Battenfeld: Deval Patrick needs to own up to this disaster

Tuesday, January 21, 2014 -- Anonymous (not verified)

Sections:

Joe Battenfeld

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Author(s):

Joe Battenfeld

If Gov. Deval Patrick has any aspirations for higher office, he needs to watch every second of the Herald’s heartbreaking video of the father of an 11-year-old boy who state officials concluded had “consensual” sex under state foster care.

This is a parent with no political agenda. He’s not part of any Republican smear campaign. He just wants the public to know how badly the state’s child protection agency failed him and his son.

The interview is hard to watch. The boy is autistic and especially vulnerable, yet Patrick’s agency tried to minimize allegations of sexual abuse, according to a frustrated school official who tried repeatedly to get the state to take action.

It’s the kind of horror story that could haunt any elected official’s national ambitions. Patrick may not run for president this time around, but that doesn’t rule him out as a vice presidential candidate or even a Supreme Court nominee. He will own this outrageous case of abuse that took place under his watch.

And this is just the latest blunder at the Department of Children and Families, an agency so riddled with mismanagement and ineptitude it lost track of 5-year-old Jeremiah Oliver for months while state workers failed to check on him.

The Herald has also reported that a former Stoneham school official accused of posing as a 14-year-old boy online to lure teenage girls into stripping was also the target of a lawsuit that slams DCF for delivering an abused foster child into his home.

Only under pressure from the public and lawmakers on the Oliver case has the Patrick administration fired a few workers and ordered an outside review of DCF by a Washington, D.C., watchdog group.

And the governor’s claims that his administration is being “transparent” are laughable. The DCF in fact has repeatedly thwarted the Herald’s attempts to get information.

Even Democrat-friendly media outlets would have trouble ignoring a scandal so bad that former Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, a Democrat with no ax to grind, has called on Patrick to “stand up” and take responsibility.

But what does the governor do when asked whether he’s done enough to clean up his agency’s massive failures? He gets huffy at the media asking the questions.

It’s possible Patrick was planning on confronting the DCF scandal in his State of the Commonwealth speech that ended up being postponed because of a few inches of snow last night. But it’s highly unlikely he would admit to any mistakes on his part.

The snow has given Patrick a reprieve. It’s not too late, governor. Please take another look at the sobbing pleas of a father whose son has to live with the DCF’s mistakes.

“Nobody did their job,” the father concludes. “Nobody did their job.”

That includes you, governor. And it’s time you admitted it. That would be a good start.